


memento

by Rigil_Kentauris



Category: Deus Ex (2000)
Genre: Anna/Paul if you've got annapaul-tinted glasses on which I most certainly do, Gen, Slight Abandonment Issues, emotional detachment, issues with self-understanding, semi-canonical character death, thinking about the past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 03:29:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: You aren't aware at what point he became a part of your persistent future. Only that at some point, he must have.





	memento

**Author's Note:**

> attempt number two at transcribing things one my phone and I have to sayi have never beenmore filled with bubbling rage in my life for example this bitch of a phone doesn't copy formatting  
> as an aside being that im on this self imposed WIP ban this started life a one of the _ways to say i love you_ things I'l im supposed to be doing and that lasted all of like a minute so

You aren't aware at what point he becomes a part of your persistent future.

That’s not true. In this business of yours, the only luxury you have is absolute, unyielding self-clarity, and in that interest, you can pinpoint the exact moment Paul Denton became a part of your future.

Manderley called you in and assigned him to you and said, this is how it's going to be, for a while. But…

That was temporary. A week of annoyances. A month. _Maybe_ more, at worst. The future - your future - was so much bigger than that.

The exact moment had to have come much later than that. Later, after the missions and relying and getting used to the sharpness in his tone when he disagrees.

((The annoyingly perpetual surprise when he doesn’t.))

Sometime after he drops the soft-edged hopefulness and fights with bitterness-tempered stubborn determination instead. Sometime after he decides to get experimental augmentations, and it just – feels – so wrong.

Sometime after you and Gunther talk him out of it.

“What the fuck do you care?!” he shouts, exasperated, after an hour and a half of going around and around in circles. And you’re no closer to an answer than you were at minute one.

“The people – the _kinds_ of people who killed my parents,” he finally says, “are still _out_ there.”

“It’s not how this is supposed to be,” you say, firmly.

He hisses a sigh, but – maybe he, at some point, started to think of you as some part of his own indelible future, because he drops it. Him. Since he woke up in the hospital after the accident, he’s never dropped a single solitary issue, as far as you know. But…

But it doesn’t end up mattering a damn, does it. Maybe it’s then, when he’s bleeding out on a roof, your target already jumped to ground and fleeing, when you first recognize your image of the future contains him. Or – no. Maybe it's when they tell you the hospital's closer by car than by helicopter, and Gunther carries his limp body down six flights of stairs and both his eyes and Gunther’s eyes start to lose their light. Or maybe it's when you’re holding on to him in the back seat, because you told Gunther to go before you’d had a chance to bother with seat belts and securing and besides. You pull his body into your lap and your arms and really, where else is more secure? You hold him and try not to contrast the gummy, wet edges of the shotgun wound with your own augmented hands.

Maybe it's when he's finally out of surgery and he's on full life-support and the doctor takes a noticeable pause and a noticeable deep breath before she opens her mouth to speak.

Probably not. Probably not then, because. It never really occurs to you that he _can_ die, much less that he’d go and do it. He's a natch – you know this – but he's _your_ natch. Your team is two augs and one natch. He's a persistent ache in your side, an annoying song stuck in your head, he's traffick on the motorway which means he's simply there. He's always **there.** ((For you.))

And when against all odds he opens his eyes and they are stark nanite blue, that simply confirms it.

Maybe then, that exact moment, when you'd stayed in his room after the emergency augmentation surgery a moment later than everyone else. You're there, and his eyes flick open just the slightest and they blaze. Maybe that was the moment some part of you decided Paul was an unalterable fixture in the layout of your future, but no, that's not true either. You'd only like that to be the moment.

In truth, you weren't paying attention. In truth, you didn't know. Not even with a countdown in place did you bother to figure it out. You see him once, when Gunther brings him in from the 'Ton and both their eyes are dim, dim, dim, but you don't think about it. You don't want to. You tell yourself that after all this time, you've earned another luxury in this business, and it’s not worrying over whether your partners can take care of themselves or not.

In truth, you've been ignoring too many things for too long.

By the time you force yourself to the lab, he's long since dead. His eyes are vacant. No naïvely idealistic optimism. No hurt, betrayed determination. No eerie bright blue. Just…nothing. He's dead, and every fantasy you have for yourself dissolves. The fantasy that you don't have to worry about your partners is first, with a stab of fear for Gunther, out on a mission. The fantasy that you have absolute, unyielding self-clarity is second - he's dead in front of you and you’re breaking up inside and you don't know why. The fantasy that the people in your life will always _be_ in your life-

No. The fantasy that the people you can count on to be in your life will always be there?

No, not yet correct either.

You touch a finger to his face, trace the strange silver that runs over his ear and ends in a dull, lifeless dot.

You can count on that one hand how many times you've touched him, you realize, and you snatch your hand back.

There is a fantasy you've held on to all your life, that the people you care about – that the people you _want_ to be in your life – will always be there. And you know it's not true, you've known it since Israel, since Russia, since you were young and since you knew what it meant to grow up. People don't stay.

You reach your hand back out in the frigid air and run your fingers stiffly through his cold hair, and realize, at some point you’d let yourself believe that he would be different. He was _supposed_ to be different, he was…

He was gone.

Gone before you'd even figured out at what point you let yourself give a damn.

He's gone, and all you have to show for it are the weeks and months and ever longer where he was supposed to be there but isn't anymore.


End file.
